Stylization is one of the great tools of moviemaking -- its broadness can capture nuances that naturalism omits. But what's the tipping point between "stylized" and "mannered"? Is a mannered movie simply a stylized one you don't like? Anderson is notorious for controlling every detail on the set, and even for those of us who don't much like his movies, the level of old-school care he puts into his work counts for something. But is it possible to care too much about craft, at the expense of risk? Until very recently, seemingly 95 percent of movies, both big-studio films and independents, suffered from overuse of handheld cameras. It's a trend that's abating, thankfully, but Anderson never fell for it, which should be admirable. But even though Anderson's films -- as shot by his go-to cinematographer, Robert Yeoman -- are beautiful to look at, he could stand to move the camera around a little more: His images are static to the point of passivity. He stares through the lens so intently that we see only what he sees -- he so thoroughly subjects us to his imagination that we barely have to use our own.

Characters in live-action Wes Anderson movies have adventures, yet there's no sense of adventure in them. It's not just that everything we see on-screen has unfolded according to a rigid plan -- Hitchcock, among the most methodical of filmmakers, worked from storyboards, and you can't get much more rigid than that. But Hitchcock's pictures move like panthers, not like machines. Anderson, on the other hand, can't achieve, and perhaps doesn't care about, the illusion of fluidity. Like him, I love tiny things, small things made carefully, and he recognizes that the unapologetic artificiality of a scale model can be more believable than its full-size (or CGI) counterpart.

Perhaps that helps explain my devotion to Fantastic Mr. Fox, the most technically obsessive film Anderson has ever made. It is, after all, a movie in which fur-covered puppets on wire armatures have been manipulated to do his bidding, shot by obsessive shot. George Clooney is the voice of Mr. Fox, a poultry thief and family man (or should that be family fox?) who tries to quit his life of crime but just can't manage it. With the help of a group of woodland associates, he breaks into the stores of three greedy farmers. All of Anderson's movies are about community, about being part of some makeshift or real family, but Fantastic Mr. Fox is the warmest and richest. When I find my annoyance with Anderson reaching peak levels, I think of the scene in which two little fox cousins who do not get along (voiced by Eric Anderson and Jason Schwartzman) creep from the beds in their cramped, shared bedroom -- they've been bickering and can't get to sleep -- and turn on a tabletop model train. They watch together in silence as it clickety-clacks around its track in the darkness, their annoyance with each other momentarily forgotten. There's no dialogue; the moment doesn't need any.

With Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson put his trademark precision in the service of a story that ultimately feels wild and free. I have no idea how he pulled it off. Some have posited that Anderson is better when he's adapting other people's work, in this case, that of the rambunctious Roald Dahl. I've sometimes wondered if puppets aren't Anderson's ideal actors: They're easier to bend, literally and figuratively, than real-live people.

But in some ways, he has less control of them: Human actors are capable of listening to and translating a director's ideas, and their tools -- voice inflections, subtle changes of expression, shifts in posture -- have infinite gradations. Plus, they're often eager to please the guy they're working for. While puppets can be designed to exact specifications, and posed and moved quite precisely, they're empty vessels. They have no personal experience to draw from, no genetically inherited grace or clumsiness, no acting training or style of their own to fall back on. In that sense, they're the ultimate rebels; they have nothing to lose. Is it possible that Fantastic Mr. Fox allowed Anderson to edge closer to human feelings -- his own or universal ones -- because puppets, stubborn constructions that they are, made him work that much harder to figure out how human feelings should look?

How, for example, do you decide which direction the fur on a fox's face should whorl to indicate that he's stressed out or confused? What should his eyes look like when he thinks he's about to lose everything? Of course, in animation, the actors' voices go a long way in shaping individual characters. But those two silent little foxes, their eyes following that train as it goes round and round? Without words, they capture a specific but fleeting nuance of childhood joy and fragility. Anderson surely cares about every character he creates, but in Fantastic Mr. Fox, he shows true tenderness, divorced from gimmickry, for the first time. It's a kind of earthbound magic.

No matter how little I care for Anderson's other films, the unexpected miracle that is Fantastic Mr. Fox means I'll never be able to turn away from him completely. Though when I said earlier that Fantastic Mr. Fox is the only Wes Anderson film I love unequivocally, I was exaggerating. His 2007 short, Hotel Chevalier, a companion piece to The Darjeeling Limited, is pretty close to perfect. In it, a nameless character played by Jason Schwartzman has set up camp in a Paris hotel room. In the short's early minutes, he rings up room service and places an order in stilted, comic-book French, pausing to ask (in English) how to say "grilled cheese." No sooner has he hung up the phone than it rings, and the husky voice he hears through the receiver -- it belongs to Natalie Portman -- thrills and terrifies him. She's near the hotel; she's coming to see him. We have no idea what the deal is with these two. We wait to see whether they'll fall into each other's arms or tear each other apart. Or both.

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I found your article by searching "why do so many people have a hard time understanding wes anderson movies" I thought you were just in-educated in artistic film-making until I realized the article was written by a female.

I then immediately understood why you only like fantastic mr. fox. That one was basically for kids. And Hotel Chavalier was a short. Stereotypically girls and kids like films to be short, sweet, romantic and spoon-fed. You liked HOTEL CHAVALIER because it was a simple love story and you didn't have to actually THINK to understand. I bet you get really moved by music videos, and I mean that with love. In fact females are so much better at love it makes me sick.

I do know a few females who like real Wes Anderson movies and they are also sarcastic comedians by nature. As far as wishing Wes would change his style to give them more life? You have never been more wrong. So many love his films because they ARE beautiful talking photographs. You also have to love dark humor... If you do not think it is a funny premise that a group of Scouts go looking for a rogue Scout armed to the teeth with brutal weapons (just like kids pretend to do in real life) than go watch whatever reboot hollywood is crapping out next. His films are not perfect but they are filled with deep thought and emotion. Oh and they are truly beautiful to look at. Just like woman. Cheers!

My first issue with Wes Anderson is his fear of real emotions. He continually stamps out all emotion, until his characters are flat cardboard cutouts. Then any little flash of emotion is treated like a huge deal. Truth is, emotion is critical to life, and stamping out all emotion makes the films lifeless, dull and boring. My second issue is his hatred of authority figures - it's always the juvenile characters who call the shots, have the ideas, rule the roost or lair or den - just like the Disney channel. So may be you have to be 13 to find the "wisdom" in his stuff, but thankfully the majority of us are smarter than that. Anderson has invented a good gig for himself, working out his therapy homework, his issues with emotions and authority to the tune of other people's millions and trying to call it "films" or "art" or "whimsy" but he's the true emperor with no clothes. There's nothing genius or even interesting about the Anderson "films" - we really should call them "Viewmaster filmstrips" because they are that lifeless - and anything on Turner Classic Movies has this stuff beat by a million miles. The genius is in tricking the gullible into thinking it's worth watching - that's the real story about Anderson that needs to be told. How is he fooling the few who think he's great? Where's that shell game playing out? It's not based in reality, so what brain circuits is he triggering in the few that make the many go looking for glory in Anderson's work, and always come away disappointed?

Nothing raises the hackles of a nation of mediocrities quite like the daunting artistry of a master. Same critiques were levelled at Kubrick. Anderson's hyper-artificial movies are the perfect movies for a hyper-artificial culture. That he treats his movie worlds like a novelist is something to be commended, not attacked. We should have more directors who give a shit like he does.

Once again, Stephanie Zacharek nails something perfectly and I couldn't agree with her more about Anderson.

It's undeniable that Anderson is an intelligent, thoughtful film maker and like Zacharek states, there are way too few of these around nowadays. But Anderson's attention to detail is annoying. He's too carried away by his own sense of whimsy and too busy trying to make us aware of it that his films (to me) feel cold, calculated and emotionally distant. I get the same feeling (in a different way) from most of the films made by Ken Russell, another director who put his style ahead of story telling and character. Actors probably love working with him because they think his films are "different" and cutting edge and that's why I think a lot of people (mostly much younger than me) fall for his films as well. I don't think he's really that original at all. He's studied film and film makers and copies a lot of other directors styles (especially the late, great Hal Ashby. Anderson's "Rushmore" should have been labeled a homage to Ashby, so blatant was his ripping off of his visual style).